[ale] AOL sues Microsoft

[Transam]

>That's what is so frustrating about MS.  They have taken a cruddy
>product and over time manipulated their way into it being the standard. 
>Now everything has to be compatible with their products.  That gives
>them the power to control everything.  The general public just doesn't
>care if MS is a monopoly and a poor sport.  They just want computing to
>be thoughtless, which windows is.  And the bad part is that the
>government will do nothing about it.  I wonder if the US government is
>willing to look the other way on this because MS is an American
>company.  Technology is power and those who control it will control the
>world... Just a thought.

It's not the US as an entity.  M$ is only in Washington State so they
don't have much support in Congress.  Of course, Bush has a different
point of view than Clinton.  (Please don't take that anywhere.)

However, other countries are shucking off M$.  The National governments
of France, China, and Mexico have all (in the past year or so) adopted
official policy that Linux shall be used on government systems whereever
possible and that M$ should be avoided for technical and cost reasons.

In the past month the South Korean government just announced the purchase
of 120,000 systems that will run Red Hat Linux.  This is 25% of their
annual purchase of systems!

All of the US Government's important servers that I've looked at run
Unix or Linux.  These include the web sites for the White House, FBI,
CIA, and NSA.  This also includes time.nist.gov (when you absolutely,
positively want to know what time it is).

Bob

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